


The Great Congress

by Mr_Crocodile



Series: On the shoulders of Titans [10]
Category: Godzilla - All Media Types
Genre: Angst and Tragedy, Child Death, China, Gen, Kaiju, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Tags Contain Spoilers, Violence, alternative history, alternative universe
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-02
Updated: 2021-03-02
Packaged: 2021-03-15 05:27:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,730
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29803599
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mr_Crocodile/pseuds/Mr_Crocodile
Summary: Surrounded from all sides and with no help on the way, Shanghai faces total annihilation at the hands of more Kaiju than what's ever been seen before.The snare tightens. There will be no way out.
Series: On the shoulders of Titans [10]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1990825
Comments: 8
Kudos: 6





	The Great Congress

**Author's Note:**

> This is a new experiment from me, a longer fic, divided into four parts, with each chapter focusing on a more personal story within the much larger events which encompass them.

**2nd of August, 1989  
** **Port of Tianjin, Tianjin, People’s Republic of China**

Mo Hu’s seiner was a modest ship, he had inherited it from his own father and, had his son not gone to university, it’d have been three generations of Mos aboard the Láng ō u, but he was much happier knowing that his boy Gong was doing well financially as a doctor in Wuwei... Considering the current situation, he was as grateful as one could be just to know that his son was as far from their home-city as Gong was. 

Mo Hu’s seiner had a good crew; all 5 of the men he employed (all of them younger than him, but that was no feat) were the sons of his own friends and neighbours in Haibin, kids he’d seen grow up and play with his own Gong for years. Of those five, only three and their families were on his ship that day. He would not wait for the rest.

Mo Hu’s seiner was an old ship, built and sold for cheap to his father when the man moved to Tianjin back in the 50s, but she did a good job and was easy and cheap to fix. After more than four decades in use, there was a good chance that every single one of the ship’s original components had either already been replaced, or was in need of replacement as soon as possible. But she was a good ship, she wouldn’t fail them.

She wouldn’t.

His ship wasn’t large, one could only fit a few dozens of people inside it. But unlike everything else he knew about the Láng ō u, he has learned that fact that very day, because, with his cockpit as the only exception, his modest ship was filled to the brim with his terrified neighbours, men holding onto the gunwale from bow to stern on his deck, their wives and children crammed into what space was available below deck. 

There were more children than there were parents, a few had simply been children entrusted to him, or his crewmen, others had arrived with the people who had heard of the many ships fleeing from the harbours, little cousins and nephews… A couple they had simply found wandering the streets completely alone. Children who, in all truth, were completely alone in what probably was the most terrifying day of their lives.

His ship and himself, as captain, were responsible for their lives.

If only they had understood sooner.

They should have known, no, they should have understood the signs, the sudden cutting of communications which had started the previous week, the national media’s sudden disinterest or attention towards any of the ongoings outside of Shanghai or the “Great Congress For The Future Of The People And Nation,” which had been going for a month so far in the Great Hall of the People, with no real effect on policy as far as he knew. 

He should have at least tried contacting his son when he’d heard from merchants in the fish markets that entries into and departures from the municipality were being restricted, forcing them to buy less from fishermen like him.

Then the rumor mill started turning, people spoke of some violent capitalist rebellion being crushed by the People’s Liberation Army down south, or of the rebels in Taipei stirring some kind of trouble.

Few had even considered the possibility of some kind of Kaiju attack like those the Japanese and Indonesians had faced, the idea of something like mere oversized animals being able to defeat the mighty people’s army was seen as ridiculous or even treasonous by the party.

Fools, all of them, including him, for ignoring even the clear signs, such as the establishment of curfews, or the arrival of more and more troops for a supposed parade after the congress reached its conclusion despite the congress being in no way finished...

That morning, hours before he usually woke up, the fires, the shooting and the  _ roaring _ , woke him up.

It had been early, very early that morning. His apartment had been a quiet place ever since his beloved Du had been taken from him by pneumonia, and without her to brighten his life up, he had turned into an austere man. The long stretches of time spent out at sea had led to him feeling more like a guest than anything else in his own home.

That had made it easier to pack his essentials when the deep and rumbling roars woke him up as they echoed and reverberated throughout the city, as if the enormous fires with their clouds of smog hadn’t been enough of an incentive. 

He had run without looking back, only stopping to relay a simple message to anyone he crossed paths with.

_ “To the dockyards! The best way out!” _

So here he was, on a ship older than himself loaded with more people than any sane captain would allow aboard a seiner that size and under a darkened sky of ash and smoke, noticeably carried out from within the city by unnatural gusts of wind. Accompanied by a chorus of demonic roars and the percussion of guns and explosions.

The sea was their way out, every other direction would have been running into a wolf’s maw.

So, why then was he so terrified? Why did he feel such dread when he knew there was no better option than heading northeast to Lüshun or southeast to Shandong by sea? The Sea had always provided for him and his family, good food and good money, until now, but today it’d provide safety, a much more sought after commodity.

Why then why did he feel as scared as he had ever felt in his life?

The reason would show itself in due time.

The waters of Bohai bay were never specially clear or unpolluted, and they should have been even murkier with all of the debris flowing downstream from Tianjin and Beijing through the rivers and canals which speared through the cities. They had also always been rather calm thanks to the natural barriers which shielded the area from the open seas.

Instead, they were raging and foaming incessantly and had the greens and blue colours of the open ocean... as if someone, something, were pushing water from the Yellow Sea into the bay by force.

It was less than perfect, but nothing his Láng ō u or the many other ships alongside it (he was only one of hundreds to have the idea of fleeing by sea) couldn’t easily handle. This was no real storm.

This was no real storm, he thought as he scanned ahead. A few miles out, a ship, not much larger than his own, was making her steady way to the open ocean, already leaving the city far behind. One of the early departures, no doubt. Lucky.

Then, in three seconds, she was gone. Only foam, broken wood, and splintered metal marked where she had been.

Mo Hu couldn't think. His fingers on the steering wheel were deathly white, but he took no notice. Those three seconds were burned into his mind's eye -- the enormous, reddish shape, cleaving through the surface, rising and rising and rising... then plunging down onto the vessel like a blood-soaked guillotine.

No real storm, indeed.

And then, with the sound of thousands upon thousands of liters of water being displaced, like a breaking dam, and a shrill roar which made him wince, it rose, the creature in its entirety, almost an island of spiked segments as red as bricks. It must have been almost a hundred meters, at least that was what he could gauge from how much of the goliath’s body was above the surface.

It looked like a demonic parody of a lobster, a living battleship made of chitin instead of steel. What remained of the unlucky ship was still smeared on the underside of one of the Kaiju’s pincers. The  _ smaller _ pincer of the pair it possessed, Mo noted with humble resignation. Whether the sway he was feeling came from the seawaves or his own uncontrollable trembling, he could not tell.

It moved slowly, half-crawling and half-swimming through the harbour’s water towards the docks with some alien intent.

And between it and the city’s docks, utterly defenseless, stood the many ships.

Some, those closer to the maritime beast, tried to turn and veer around it to no avail. Some simply capsized due to the enormous waves of water displaced by the animal’s movements or impaled by its many legs. A smaller and especially unlucky ship was picked up in its entirety by the beast with its pincers, a third of it crushed instantly like a walnut’s shell. Mo saw a couple of figures jump into the water, but the rest, probably frozen by fear, stayed aboard even as the beast brought the ship close to its mandibles. He was sure that only the sound of the wood being splintered could be heard from a distance, but the sounds of the dying and their cracking bones found a home in his mind anyways.

Screaming, screaming from the decks of his and all other ships, screaming from below deck too, even if those poor souls were spared from the sight.

He and his crew tried to evade it, to put as much distance between themselves and the leviathan as possible and to sneak around it into open waters and safety.

But it was not enough. They could not evade the sight of the creature’s beady black eyes.

He was a fisherman, and if nothing else, he knew how relentless one, man or beast, could be at sea when the price was tantalizing enough. When the taste of the well prepared catch was rewarding enough. He had seen men wrestle tuna fish larger than themselves into ships without more incentive than a good pay. This monster would be satisfied by nothing lesser than a full belly.

The Láng ō u could not, would not, make it.

As the colossal pincer came down on them, his mind and soul were split. Half of him grateful that his beloved had not lived long enough to suffer this fate and that his son was somewhere else, somewhere safe. The other half filled with misery and guilt.

Because, after all, there were more children than parents inside the Láng ō u.

**Author's Note:**

> Wow, that was dark, wasn't it? ;)
> 
> As always, here's the [Link](https://forms.gle/sbMyGVk4fEM64oVq8) to the poll I will be using to decide what the next instalment of this series will be! Voting for the next installment of this story will be blocked until after I have written the next standalone fic.
> 
> Thanks to my betas for their incredible work (And a big thanks to my friend Areias on the A Thing Of Vikings Discord server for once again helping me with the Chinese language used in this story).
> 
> I hope you enjoyed the story and I honestly appreciate all and any kudos or comments you may be gracious enough to gift me! I'm open to suggestions for other possible settings and Kaiju for me to use in the comments ;)


End file.
